CauseWired’s Tom Watson spoke at the 2014 Giving Under The Influence Symposium on April 24th at the National Press Club in Washington DC on employee engagement, corporate philanthropy and the work of the nonprofit sector. The panel was sponsored by America’s Charities, a nonprofit coalition of the U.S. charitable organizations that provides workplace charitable giving campaigns, technology and thought leadership in the sector. This year, America’s Charities did something incredibly smart in conceiving the annual Snapshot report on employee engagement and corporate giving: they surveyed the nonprofits themselves, and focused on those organizational needs.

In this video clip, Tom and Emily Simone, Director of Community Relations for Lockheed Martin, and Debra Snider, Vice President of Operations for GuideStar, draw from their own experiences and businesses to answer a question from the audience at America’s Charities’ April 24th Giving Under The Influence Symposium in Washington, D.C. The discussion was geared to an audience of corporate social responsibility and nonprofit leaders attending the event.

]]>http://www.causewired.com/2014/05/importance-of-nonprofit-strategic-plans/feed/0Why Philanthropy Matters: ‘The Love That Understands’http://www.causewired.com/2013/11/why-philanthropy-matters-to-democracy-the-love-that-understands/
http://www.causewired.com/2013/11/why-philanthropy-matters-to-democracy-the-love-that-understands/#commentsMon, 25 Nov 2013 23:00:38 +0000http://www.causewired.com/?p=914Note: Recently, I spent National Philanthropy Day with the Mid-Hudson Valley Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and served as the luncheon keynote speaker. This post on the challenges of philanthropy is adapted from that speech.

Americans are asked to give – and in fact, do give – more to organized charity than the citizens of any other country. Philanthropy is part of the national DNA and it dates to the time of the Founders and before, when Benjamin Franklin organized the first public charities on this continent. That instinct to both organize and give money to important causes helps to drive much of what we refer to as the nonprofit or social sector. Yet that funding remains both frustratingly small scale and under challenge in an era when the rise of global information networks is shaking up the traditional foundations of civil society.

Think of the challenges that philanthropy is asked to solve. We fight disease, and try to prevent it. We preserve the natural environment. We care for the elderly, the sick, the displaced and the poor. We support the arts and encourage culture. We teach our young, and plan for the future. And of course we support our local communities. Within 25 miles of this room, philanthropy is at work in hospitals, schools, religious organizations, social services, arts, culture, advocacy and research. It’s at work in the preserving of this region’s public resources, from a walking bridge spanning the Hudson to the historic sites connected to the founder of the New Deal. And when a typhoon ravages a country that has a strong immigrant tie to the United States – and what country doesn’t – our society responds, as it did this past week.

It’s everywhere, and for most of the people in this room, the good works that are accomplished in Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties come with a professional call to service. Our own work has a double bottom line – the family budget, and the impact our jobs have on society. And I know those jobs – and that double bottom line – are increasingly challenging.

Here’s why: giving in the U.S. has stayed level through economic boom times and recessions. It’s always roughly 2% of GDP, and has been since about 1970 when they started collecting these numbers. Yet both the number of nonprofits and the societal burden they are asked to shoulder have grown dramatically.

According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits in the U.S. increased by 25 percent; from 1.2 million to more than 1.5 million – and it continues to grow. This includes all nonprofits, foundations, and related associations. In terms of the number of enterprises, the growth rate of the nonprofit sector has surpassed the rate of both the business and government sectors.

So as many of you already know, there is more competition for the dollar. And there is more need as well. The privatization of many of government’s functions that began in the 1980s has gradually moved more services from public payrolls to private payrolls. And when they say “private” they’re often referring to charitable enterprises and not businesses. Companies are in the business of handling some of the function government used to, of course, but I don’t think it’s a surprise to find that for-profit organizations zero in on enterprises where profit is possible. That leaves the rest for us.

Meanwhile, our more forward-thinking supporters – Board members, foundations, social investors – ask organizations to be more businesslike, more focused, more strategic – sometimes forgetting that businesses fail at a much higher rate than nonprofits. Yet in many ways they’re right about how the sector operates – we can’t afford to be sleepy and retrograde. The world is changing, people are more connected to information than ever before, and philanthropy is clearly a connected global marketplace. We are asked to be more transparent by our donors and supporters, and we need to be.

To me, this goes beyond being on Facebook or Twitter or taking donations via a smartphone at the annual gala. Those things are great, but they really relate to tactics – and not strategy. When I wrote my book CauseWired five years ago, the idea of networks that allowed fast organizing and online leadership was still relatively new. Now it’s as much a part of the landscape as the Bear Mountain Bridge.

But the strategy around using networks well connects to what so many of us – both old practitioners with some gray hair and bold young change-makers – understand about giving. I tell my nonprofit clients in my consulting practice that every major fundraising effort – from a capital campaign to the gala to a crowdsourced project on Kickstarter – needs four key elements: a strong case for support, committed leadership, prospects for giving, and a plan to get there. I want to boil that formula down to two big take-aways from today, as we think about how our sector moves forward in a networked world – one that is still changing in business, in government, in how we interact on the public commons.

One is “impact” – which to me is the story of how we present the outcomes of our work and our giving. In today’s media saturated environment, we’d better have our stories straight – and they’d better be accurate and easily understood. One of the challenges I present to clients on the case-building side of my practice is a simple exercise – tell me about your impact in a single tweet. Can you describe who you are and what you’re changing in 140 characters or less?

Yes, it’s a bit silly. But it can be revealing as well. It’s a short messaging world now – long-form writers (like me) just live in it. And it doesn’t mean we don’t need great written cases, strategic plans, and grant applications – we know we do. But communicating impact clearly and quickly is what the audience demands, from the busy hedge fund titan down to the $25 donor. If you distill your message well, any version you serve will have a stronger and more authentic taste.

The other is “asking.” We all know that generally speaking we have to ask to receive, or be asked to give. And in those transactions who is doing the asking matters. When I work on major gift efforts or campaign, much of the work is matching up prospects with the right people to be in the room. It’s the same as when we build our networks – how can we match the voice of the organization with the people in that network we need to reach…and eventually ask for money.

There is one key pitfall to avoid in this: and that’s thinking that these networks are “new” or “special” or “high tech.” They’re not. They’re groups of people using new tools to connect, nothing more and nothing less. Don’t segregate “online” or “mobile” or “social network” donors from other supporters – much of that is convenience and opportunity. It’s where the people are. Spend your time and resources, rather, in cultivating these donors where they live – across many platforms. Tell the story well and provide the opportunity to share and interact. React to questions, concerns, feedback. Focus on being open and available, rather than building silos and lists.

On the giving side, I’d urge the foundation and corporate giving folks here to also adopt that network-facing idea of being more open and available. If you’re really trying to solve a problem and document real impact in your grant-making and areas of focus, better connections to both your partners on the ground – aka nonprofits – and the community at large will make your work that much better.

We hear every day about mobile giving and crowdsourcing and collective impact and corporate social responsibility – these are real changes roiling our once traditional waters. But let me throw an old-school concept at you: leadership.

Leadership drives the creation of great nonprofit causes. It drives the giving side, and it drives the service side. It creates the great online success stories, and it drives our capital campaigns. When we see the images of Pope Francis in our social media streams and on our phones and on Facebook, we know that’s leadership by the sheet image of it, and the words used – even if we’re not Catholics! (And by the way, Pope Francis is now the number one Twitter celebrity). But when we talk about a networked society, leadership doesn’t have to be big or famous. It can be your neighbor asking you to support her cause – it can be your cousin in California asking you to make a pledge to his walkathon – it can be the folks at the office organizing in workplace giving programs. The network – and the modern digital tools power power it – simply make instances leadership and inspiration easier to share. And that’s our opportunity.

I love working in this sector. Five years ago I left a big consulting firm to write, and teach, and partner with organizations of my own choosing. And every day, the network brings me new opportunities, new ideas, and new challenges. Yes, these are challenging times in our sector – the opportunity help people is that much greater.

I’ll close with the words of perhaps the most famous American to hail from the mid-Hudson Valley. In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt told a national convention that faith, hope, and charity should be the watchwords of American progress. And then he added: “Charity – in the true spirit of that grand old word. For charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves.”

Those words from the age of radio – and from a time when darkness seemed to be closing in on democracy like a freight train – still ring true today. Your work is hard, but incredibly important. And as we all navigate the technical and cultural hurdles of our networked world together, remembering the idea of a “love that understands” – a mature, professional love for what we do in our work in this sector – can help us to focus on what matters most: our causes and their impact.

Great panel at the Washington Post yesterday, as America’s Charities convened its #GivingUndertheInfluence symposium to discuss trends in workplace giving and growing roles of millennials and digital networks. I was honored to join Marc Johnson, vice president of digital strategy in the Studio/Online division of APCO Worldwide; Heather Lofkin Wright, national director of community service for PwC; and George Weiner, president of digital cause consultancy WholeWhale along with moderator Marcia Bullard, chairman of America’s Charities and a founding editor of USA Today.

It was a wide-ranging discussion that touched on generational issues, demographics, giving patterns, online marketing, philanthropic trends – and some common sense advice and solutions. In prepping for the panel I was struck with the quality of America’s Charities’ white paper, Snapshot, which reveals some of the latest research on trends and strategies around employee engagement and giving. Two years ago, Howard Greenstein and I authored a white paper plumbing some of the same trends under the auspices of New York University’s Heyman Center for Fundraising & Philanthropy, Wired Workforce, Networked CSR. The new report advances the ball significantly and shows just how much younger workers – particularly so-called millennials born after 1980 – are changing the world of workplace giving and networked philanthropy. I highly recommend Snapshot to CauseWired folks.

Meanwhile, here’s the excellent Storify stream created by America’s Charities to capture the #GivingUndertheInfluence conversation yesterday:

Very nice for CauseWired to be included in this guide from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Written by Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good, the post focuses on key strategic imperatives for nonprofits and causes as they consider the social graph. Here is CauseWired’s contribution:

It’s very easy to jump into social media, but if you’re an organization with a track record in a certain sector – or an ambitious social enterprise – some patient listening at the beginning will pay off. Spend time getting to know the voices, the issues, people with big followings, the funders, and the competition. Make Twitter lists, join LinkedIn groups, like some key Facebook pages. Make some notes and see where the channels are. Then let your voice be heard. And this advice always applies – even organizations with big followings and social media operations shouldn’t just broadcast. They should listen, be respectful and generous, and be part of a larger conversation.

In 1731, a 25-year-old Philadelphia printer set out to solve a problem – one that affected the future of his industry and the social good. Despite innovations in technology, popular books still cost too much for the average citizen. Yet getting more books into circulation would clearly increase interest in his own craft, and lead to a better informed public, including his own friends and colleagues. This young pursuer of a double bottom line created a unique social venture – and he used crowdsourcing to fund it.

The model was simple, really. A total of 50 subscribers invested 40 shillings each to start a circulating library. They all agreed to further invest 10 shillings more every year to buy additional books and to help maintain the library. They adopted a Latin motto – Communiter Bona Profundere Deum Est – which translates as “To support the common good is divine.”

The social entrepreneur was Benjamin Franklin. His social venture was The Library Company of Philadelphia. And the crowd that funded his social venture was the famed Junto, a loose coalition of smart young Philadelphians interested in the public good in the first half of the 18th century. Their self interest was greater access to a wider variety of books; Franklin’s was in printing them. And the society itself benefited from a better educated, better informed core of leading citizens, many of whom would one day fund and lead the founding of a much larger social venture – a republic.

Of course, crowdsourcing is everywhere these days. It’s a term meant to signal the evolution of passive social media to more active financial participation. And it takes advantage of technological advances and the growth of networks that can be used -in the form of “crowdfunding” – to drive causes, raise money, fund projects, and create new organizations. Yet it’s really an adaptation on an old and trusted technique – asking friends to support a project, and they will ask their friends, and so on. Franklin’s “crowd” was a small group of young Colonial elite – today, hundreds may fund a film or a cause through Kickstarter or IndieGogo, a journalism project through Spot.us, or a band’s appearance through GigFunder. And the “crowd” can support small entrepreneurs in the developing world via platforms like Kiva‘s, fund school-based projects through DonorsChoose, or back international projects of impact through GlobalGiving.

This week, my colleagues Marcia Stepanek, Howard Greenstein, and I will begin our second year of teaching “The Wired Nonprofit,” a master’s degree course at New York University’s George Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising. The class focuses on the use of social media and networked technology to serve nonprofits, foundations, and social causes. We’ll be talking about the big platforms – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, LinkedIn – and how can we can we make them work for us. It’s crucial that organizations – and those training to lead them – understand the future of networked philanthropy and fundraising, we believe. But it’s just as crucial for those today’s wired philanthropies to understand the connection to what has always mattered in gathering support for important social causes: that personal connection, good communications and story-telling, the importance of impact on those the cause serves, and the plan for getting it right.

In the pursuit of those verities, our students could do worse than to study the early crowdfunding techniques of Benjamin Franklin. He invented crowdsourced philanthropy – heck, Franklin largely invented American philanthropy. He was the leading technologist of his day, and a man who was intimately familiar with the top media technology of his time and in building social networks. Franklin used that social network – in the form on subscriptions, his own circle of leaders called the Jun-toe, and the printing press to raise funds for the first fire department, the first public library, a public meeting house, a university, a public hospital.

Franklin understood how fundraising – wired or otherwise – really works. He knew it challenges and its limits. This passage from his autobiography could be required reading for aspirational nonprofit executives and fundraisers:

The Rev. Gilbert Tennant came to me with a request that I would assist him in procuring a subscription for erecting a new meeting-house. … Unwilling to make myself disagreeable to my fellow-citizens by too frequently soliciting their contributions, I absolutely refused. He then desired that I would furnish him with a list of the names of persons I knew by experience to be generous and public-spirited. I thought it would be unbecoming in me, after their kind compliance with my solicitations, to mark them out to be worried by other beggars, and therefore refused also to give such a list. He then desired that I would at least give him my advice. “That I will readily do,” I said I; “and, in the first place, I advise you to apply to all those whom you know will give something; next, to those whom you are uncertain whether they will give any thing or not, and show them the list of who have given; and lastly, do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing, for in some of those you may be mistaken.”

This is exactly how we work in philanthropy and nonprofits and social entrepreneurship – and it’s how we work both online and offline. There is usually no shortcut in fundraising, creating a cause, building an organization. Success often centers on the will to ask. Be “full of courtesy, full of craft,” Franklin once advised via his alter ego, Poor Richard.

But he also had another saying that will undoubtedly ring true 250 years later to fundraisers and social entrepreneurs everywhere: “An empty bag cannot stand upright.”

Flip the calendar, start a new tax year. Double down on changing the world. That’s about the simplest New Year’s resolution for a social entrepreneur or nonprofit leader. Every January doesn’t require a new strategic plan. Sometimes you need to just keep things on track. But I’d still urge everyone who leads or supports a social enterprise in a major way to take a bit of time to re-examine the assumptions that underlay your definition of success.

For me, that’s going to start with vocabulary. I’m going to start with one word that makes virtually every powerpoint presentation, strategic planning document, and board retreat briefing book I’ve ever seen. It will appear in every hot nonprofit book title released this year, and will adorn every company’s plan for corporate social responsibility. Solo social entrepreneurs working in the philanthropic equivalent of the start-up garage will over-use it – and so will the heads of the world’s largest NGOs.

I speak of “scale.”

If there’s a single most over-used term in the social sector, this is it. Every business plan, every strategic plan, every five-year timeline talks about “reaching scale.” Usually, this simply means “size.” And that size is related to either a population, a geographic area, or a societal problem that “reaching scale” – aka size – will allow an enterprise to serve more completely. And let’s face it, size is really a euphemism for “budget” – which itself is just one click upstream from “fundraising.”

I’ve fallen victim to the blind pursuit of scale, and have found myself stranded on an endless and unattainable quest for a mythical philanthropic Valhalla. It’s not that scale is a bad concept; it’s that is endlessly misused. So here are five typical aspects of the scale conversation that I’m going to pay more attention to in 2013:

1. Scale doesn’t just mean gigantic. Great ideas are everywhere, exceeded only by the societal problems that need solving. But plenty of worthy nonprofits, start-ups, foundations, and social enterprises aren’t going to get to what the public commercial markets think of as scale. There will be very few Googles or Facebooks, and very few signs along the nonprofit freeway for “One billion served.” Small and impactful is fine. Changing lives in one town or city is great. Good work that is measurable – and fund-able – is the real Holy Grail, not getting to the status of Big-Ass Nonprofit Inc. So perhaps instead of thinking “big,” we should think “deep.”

2. Scale doesn’t always mean efficiency. Yeah, I know – there’s a guy on your board who works as the COO for a major multinational. His boss, the company’s founder, is in the Forbes 400. It’s all about efficiency for those guys. The bigger you get, the lower your cost-per-unit is. And the whole thing can be digital besides. They wrote it all down for you on a cocktail napkin at the holiday luncheon, right? Well, forget it. Yes, there will be a handful of social sector start-ups for whom vast efficiencies – ask their operational systems – are the special sauce. But in general, you’re not moving units. You’re serving human beings. You’re changing lives. You’re improving something. And quality matters. In my consulting work, I’ve counseled more than one nonprofit that grew more inefficient with scale – they added on programs based on opportunity until their mission became a jumble, and soon the year-to-year goal became more about preserving the institution instead moving the needle for the people it served.

3. Scale’s kissing cousin is fundraising. You can’t grow without funding. And unless I’ve missed something, the U.S. rate of supporting philanthropic ventures with donations has bobbed just south of two percent of GDP for about … well, forever really. Through good times, and bad times, and worse times. U.S. giving may be the highest in the world, but it’s steady. And social venture “investing” is still small as well, so even with a double bottom line, you’re looking at a potential capital pool that’s many times smaller than it is for a company making widgets, digital or otherwise. If you want to be the new Red Cross, you’re going to have to find a channel for raising tens of millions of dollars – even if your idea is the best in the world. Philanthropy and social enterprise are part of a marketplace. So remember, the sky is not the limit – there’s a ceiling up there. If you’re projecting “scale” in your strategic planning, keep those spreadsheets in the realm of reality. Gandalf’s not going to knock on your door.

4. Scale takes a long time. Like decades. Back in the 90s when I covered Internet start-ups, every founder seemed to have an “eBay of” plan – as in, “we’re going to be the eBay of pet supplies.” That was always closely followed by “….when we get to scale.” And sometimes, the combination of super-heated capital markets and well-executed ideas can indeed lead to the kind of overnight scale eBay represented. But I haven’t seen that in the social space – not even once. For nonprofits or social purpose companies, it takes longer – and for good reasons. For one, the main goal is to help people or change society – that’s both harder to accomplish and more difficult to measure than the sales of this year’s smart phone model. And for another, there is little institutional liquidity in the social capital marketplace – organizations rarely merge or acquire other organizations. What creates big hits quickly in the commercial world isn’t generally available ton nonprofits. So the real winners are the enterprises who stick it out, grow over time, weather the storm, and build a wider base of support.

5. Scale doesn’t guarantee real impact. Say what, you say? Surely, the larger and more widely accessed an organization’s services, the greater the impact, right? Not necessarily. That’s because impact is the slippery fish of the social sector. It’s too easy to be drawn into a one-dimensional measurement of success: straightforward metrics like poverty rates, homeless people on the streets, graduation rates, cure rates, and the like. And those standards are clearly important. But because the underlying reasons for those factors – aka the reasons why we’re measuring them in the first place – can be so manifold and multifaceted, it’s a challenge for every social enterprise to draw a true bead on the target of impact. That’s why a good social venture adjusts its measures over time – and resolutely closes down efforts that aren’t working, even while trying new solutions. The ground is always moving, after all. And the pursuit of quality should rate as highly as the race for size.

I’ll still speak often of scale in 2013 – to clients, in my writing and public speaking, and in my work. But I’m vowing here and now not to get caught up in its more mythical aspects. I’m giving those up this year. And it’s a lot easier than another new diet, anyway.

]]>http://www.causewired.com/2013/01/the-nonprofits-new-years-resolution-re-examine-scale/feed/0How to Develop Sustainable Fundraising & Employee Engagement Plans Using Social Mediahttp://www.causewired.com/2012/06/how-to-develop-sustainable-fundraising-employee-engagement-plans-using-social-media/
http://www.causewired.com/2012/06/how-to-develop-sustainable-fundraising-employee-engagement-plans-using-social-media/#commentsMon, 04 Jun 2012 16:10:13 +0000http://www.causewired.com/?p=863Here are some excerpts from the speech I gave at the America’s Charities annual membership conference at Georgetown University in Washington DC two weeks ago:

]]>http://www.causewired.com/2012/06/how-to-develop-sustainable-fundraising-employee-engagement-plans-using-social-media/feed/0Social Ventures: Tom Watson’s New Blog at Forbeshttp://www.causewired.com/2012/04/social-ventures-my-new-blog-at-forbes/
http://www.causewired.com/2012/04/social-ventures-my-new-blog-at-forbes/#commentsThu, 19 Apr 2012 01:06:12 +0000http://www.causewired.com/?p=857I’m late in announcing this here (on my own site – the cobbler’s children run barefoot, I know) but I’ve signed to write the new Social Ventures blog over at Forbes. I admire what Forbes is doing in terms of bring in a variety of new voices, and I’m enjoying engaging a new audience there around social entrepreneurship, causes, philanthropy, nonprofits, social media, technology and the public commons.

Yes, that’s (intentionally) a very wide beat and I’m digging it immensely. Here are the first dozen Social Ventures columns – hope you become a regular reader.

]]>http://www.causewired.com/2012/04/social-ventures-my-new-blog-at-forbes/feed/0Third Billion Campaign: the Emerging Economic Power of Womenhttp://www.causewired.com/2012/02/third-billion-campaign-the-emerging-economic-power-of-women/
http://www.causewired.com/2012/02/third-billion-campaign-the-emerging-economic-power-of-women/#commentsWed, 08 Feb 2012 00:05:28 +0000http://www.causewired.com/?p=854Last week, the La Pietra Coalition launched a major new global initiative, the Third Billion Campaign, aimed at expanding women’s employment, access to finance, markets and education. A coalition of business leaders, NGOs, former government officials, economists and commentators (I’m proud to be in their ranks) is spearheading the decade long campaign to galvanize corporations and NGO’s all over the world to tap into women’s economic potential as employees, entrepreneurs, producers and consumers.

In making the announcement Sandra Taylor, Senior Director of La Pietra Coalition, and the driving force behind the Third Billion Campaign said, “The evidence is clear: women are the emerging market with the greatest potential for accelerating global economic growth over the next decade. Investing in women will transform their lives and lead to prosperity for their families, their communities and for business globally.” In other words: if women’s economic potential can be successfully harnessed and leveraged, it would be the equivalent of having an additional one billion individuals in business and in the workforce, contributing to the global economy: often referred to as the “third billion.”

The launch of the Third Billion Campaign, which will properly prepare and enable women, in both developing, emerging and industrialized nations,—whose economic lives have been stunted, under-leveraged or suppressed has the support and participation of major global corporations including The Coca- Cola Company, Ernst and Young, Accenture and Standard Chartered Bank, as well as the World Bank.

I’ve watched the La Pietra Coalition (a project of Vital Voices, which encourages women’s leadership around the world) wrangle with creating real momentum for this crucial issue – especially in terms of hard economic data and the world agenda. I’ve taken part in two of the three meetings at NYU’s amazing Villa la Pietra campus in Florence, and the energy and vital ideas on display at those gatherings was inspiring. I think that the significance of the Third Billion Campaign, and those who are supporting it, is an indication of the power of women and the difference they can make in economic growth.

The Third Billion Campaign was a result of work carried out by Booz & Company’s analysis of International Labor Organization data on women in the global workforce. The Booz report determined that approximately 860 million women worldwide are “not prepared” – lacking sufficient secondary education – and/or “not enabled” – lacking support from families and communities – to take part in the world economy. The vast majority of these women, between the ages of 20 and 65 – 822 million – live in emerging and developing countries and the rest – 47 million – live in North America, Western Europe and Japan. Counting female births and those under age twenty, this number will add up to a billion in the next decade.

Beth Brooke, global vice chair of Ernst and Young, does a brilliant job of explaining the importance of the campaign in this Bloomberg TV interview:

]]>http://www.causewired.com/2012/02/third-billion-campaign-the-emerging-economic-power-of-women/feed/0Avoiding Founder’s Syndrome: What Social Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Julian Assangehttp://www.causewired.com/2012/02/avoiding-founders-syndrome-what-social-entrepreneurs-can-learn-from-julian-assange/
http://www.causewired.com/2012/02/avoiding-founders-syndrome-what-social-entrepreneurs-can-learn-from-julian-assange/#commentsTue, 07 Feb 2012 22:02:02 +0000http://www.causewired.com/?p=865What began as a bold global initiative to challenge the information hegemony of governments and open them to wider, better-informed participation by citizens in the digital age is trickling toward irrelevance and outright shame in the cramped quarters of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, as the leader of the once-revolutionary secret-exposing site Wikileaks uses the guise of political asylum to escape serious allegations of sexual violence in Sweden. As his dwindling band of supporters argues about Swedish rape law, UK extradition treaties and theorizes on a plot to spirit him to Guantanamo Bay via Stockholm, Julian Assange attracts the public approval of creepy rape apologists and intellectually incurious political sloganeers enamored with his (relatively recent) shift toward virulent anti-Western rhetoric.

How did the once high-flying Wikileaks come to stand for a numbing, endless, victim-shaming slog aimed at somehow keeping Assange from answering the Swedish rape case? How did Wikileaks, which once stood for open government and the use of crowd-sourced online tools to reveal the impartial truth, come to create a cable television interview program featuring Assange on the network created by the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin to, as the Columbia Journalism Reviewput it, provide “relentlessly negative media coverage of the west—in particular, the United States?” How did an enterprise whose mission demands respect for the truth come to create and distribute a fake opinion column by Bill Keller of The New York Times,with whom Assange has openly feuded? How did an organization that, for a time, prided itself publicly on a strenuous redaction process that worked to safeguard the identity of those who might be endangered by the leaks of sensitive government documents come to dump a massive and unredacted trove of US State Department cables on the Internet with no consideration for the human consequences? How did the creator of Wikileaks find himself holed up in a London diplomatic flat, counting on the goodwill of a country known for its recent crackdown on press freedom to provide asylum?

In short, how did Wikileaks come to be nothing more – and nothing less – than the personal saga of Julian Assange, the man on the balcony in London?

If nothing else, Wikileaks is a clear (and rather spectacular) case of Founder’s Syndrome – that enterprise-killing malady that conflates the original noble goals of a start-up with the imperfect life of one mortal human being who happened to come up with the idea.

I’ve seen it before, many times, since I started covering tech start-ups with Jason Chervokas at @NY in the 1990s. I’ve seen it in start-ups I’ve been associated with. And heck, I may actually have been guilty of it in the half dozen or more companies and websites I’ve founded myself. One person embodies a growing organization, internalizes all decision-making, roots out those who come to question leadership decisions as “disloyal,” and generally manages on personal instinct and whim, leading to wildly inconsistent detours that pull the enterprise away from its original mission. That person, as Forbes contributor Kevin Ready put it recently, often has ” a deep seated (and mostly unconscious) psychological need to be the center of the operation, and to be recognized.” Sound familiar, Wikileaks followers?

The temptation to hold on, control everything, and “be the face” of the organization is just as tempting for nonprofits and social ventures. Mario Morino, author of the recent Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity and a social investor (and former high tech CEO), put it succinctly a few years back in discussing the evolution of causes: “The hard truth is that many organizations grow beyond the capabilities of their founders and need more and different types of leadership, skills, and broader mission ownership to succeed. This realization—that this time, the needed change falls on your doorstep—is a tough punch to the gut for a founder.”